Globalized Economy Hits Home In The Heartland

EVANSVILLE, IND. — After 22 years working for Zenith, Rose Stinchfield was given $500 severance pay last year and told that her job was being moved to Mexico.

This manufacturing city along a bend in the Ohio River lost one of its major employers when Zenith Corp. shut down two television-cabinet

manufacturing plants and laid off more than 1,000 workers. The jobs went to Juarez, where workers are paid only a fraction of the $8 an hour that employees earned in Evansville.

``It makes me sick to my stomach that all these jobs go overseas,`` said Stinchfield, 48, who took a newspaper delivery route to help support herself and her 18-year-old son.

Here and in communities around the nation, people feel bewildered and threatened by an increasingly competitive world economy.

They see a flood of imports as taking away U.S. jobs, and they are alarmed to see foreign investors buying well-known companies and choice real estate in the United States with the cheap dollars accumulated from financing growing U.S. indebtedness.

In a recent nationwide Gallup Poll, 50 percent of respondents said they were very concerned about the loss of jobs in the U.S. to foreign competition. Forty percent said they were worried about the decline in the quality of U.S. products, and 42 percent said they were anxious about the growth of foreign investment in this country.

Economists, on the other hand, point to the benefits that flow from an increasingly global economy, including opportunities for U.S. companies to increase exports as trade barriers are lowered abroad.

Both sides of this equation can be found in Evansville. George Koch Sons Inc., one of Evansville`s major employers, has seen its export business grow as a devalued dollar has made its line of paint-finishing equipment cheaper for foreign customers.

The grass-roots economic concerns cross political and ideological lines and put people such as union organizer Gary Gardner, a liberal Democrat, and auto-parts dealer W.D. ``Turk`` Walton Jr., a two-time Reagan voter, on common ground.

The two Evansville natives said they worry that the U.S. is losing out economically to Japan and other countries, which seem to be outdoing the U.S. in world markets and taking away jobs in this country.

said Gardner, 33. ``It is so pervasive, particularly in this area, and people are very concerned about it.``

Today`s economic problems are the result of 20 years during which ``the U.S. got fat and happy and got caught with its britches down by the Japanese and others,`` said Walton, 45. He left an executive job at a Fortune 500 company seven years ago to run the auto-parts business started 77 years ago by his grandfather.

Alarmed by the wave of foreign takeovers of U.S. companies, Walton said he worries about the economic future for his four children:

``Are we going to be able to keep up? Do we have the grit, or have we had it too easy for too long?``

Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis has picked up on this public unease about trade, budget deficits and the notion that the U.S. standard of living is eroding. Dukakis has campaigned hard on what he calls ``economic patriotism`` to restore the endangered world standing of the U.S.

Meanwhile, Vice President George Bush has concentrated on defending the Reagan economic record, pointing to the extraordinary economic expansion of the last five years and the growing work force to paint the Democrats as doom- and-gloomers.

``America is not in decline,`` Bush often says.

What has made this issue hard for politicians to gauge is that while Americans want videocassette recorders, Toyotas, tape recorders and other imports, they are deeply troubled by what the flood of goods is doing to the U.S. economy.

Behind this concern is an awareness that, in the Reagan years, the U.S. has become the world`s largest debtor nation.

The value of the dollar, once taken to be the symbol of U.S. strength, has been driven down 40 percent to help U.S. goods sell abroad and discourage Americans from buying foreign products.

The cheapened dollar, while aiding some U.S. exporters, has triggered a buying spree by foreigners holding valuable marks, pounds and yen. Nearly half of the prime commercial real estate in Los Angeles has been bought up by foreigners, and nearly 3 million Americans work for foreign-owned companies, according to the Congressional Economic Leadership Institute.

``The huge increase in foreign purchases of U.S. stocks and bonds, real estate, and industrial and retail firms has led many to believe that foreign influence over the American economy is going to be the biggest political and economic issue confronting our country through the 1990s,`` said Rep. James J. Florio (D., N.J.), chairman of a congressional panel studying the issue.

Americans grew up comfortable in the notion that the U.S. was No. 1 in the world. Today only 1 in 4 say they believe that, according to a poll by Daniel Yankelovich Group.